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BIG PHYSICS, BIG QUESTIONS –

Forum: Victorian values in chemistry – Sadly, they hardly apply today

By EDDIE ABEL and JOHN EMSLEY

ON A November’s evening in 1889, Carl Langer was working late in the
private laboratory of a large house in St John’s Wood in London when he
noticed a strange thing. He was studying the effect of carbon monoxide gas
on nickel. Because carbon monoxide is very toxic he burnt off the waste
gas from his apparatus, and it was as Langer was watching its quiet blue
flame at the end of an experiment that he saw it suddenly flare up and become
much brighter.

He called his boss, the industrialist Ludwig Mond, who owned the house,
and together they repeated the experiment. The same thing happened again.
As chemists they knew that some new volatile compound had been made, but
what? In fact they were the first to make nickel carbonyl, a colourless
liquid which is so volatile that it boils at 43 Degree C.

Mond turned this discovery into a major industry for refining nickel,
a metal for which there was then a growing demand in electroplating, coinage
and alloys such as those used in armour plating (the ability of nickel to
strengthen steel was reported in that same year by J. Riley of Glasgow).
Mond developed his process and, in 1902, opened the Mond Nickel works in
Swansea, where the same process is still carried on today, although the
plant is now part of International Nickel.

Mond died in 1909. His story is a classic example of a self-made man
of the type extolled in that bible of Victorian values, Samuel Smile’s Self
Help. It has been saidof Margaret Thatcher that her favouritescientist and
hero is Michael Faraday. Mond, surely, would be a more appropriate choice.

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Mond, the gentleman chemist of St John’s Wood, was a German Jew who
first visited Britain in 1862. By the time he died he was one of the richest
men in the Empire. Not only did he amass great wealth but he used his fortune
to collect art treasures, and in his will he left these to the National
Gallery, where they are currently on display. In addition he gave large
bequests to the Royal Society, the Royal Institution, the British Academy
and several universities; all in the great tradition of Victorian entrepreneurs.

A closer look at this remarkable man and his society shows how simple
chemistry could reap such rewards. Mond was bornin 1839 to a silk merchant
of Cassel. At 14he went to the local polytechnic school(the equivalent of
one of Britain’s new City Technical Colleges) where his interest in chemistry
spurred him to do a degree at Heidelberg University. Luckily the great Robert
Bunsen, of burner fame, who was the professor of chemistry, did not divert
him into a teaching career. But then hewas not likely to, given Mond’s record.
Although his father paid for his education, including his fees, Mond was
usually in debt, and when he economised it was more on his studies than
on his social life. He eventually left without completing his degree, and
went to work in the fledgling chemical industry.

He came to live in Britain in 1866, when he was 27. He had by this time
worked out a way of turning the sulphur waste of the alkali industry into
sulphuric acid. The process was taken up by a firm in Widnes in Cheshire,
Hutchinsons, in which Mond was eventually taken into partnership. However,
the breakthrough in his career came when he obtained the licence for the
newly-discovered Solvay process for making sodium bicarbonate. In collaboration
with another chemist, John Brunner, he improved the process and, by the
time he was 43, Mond and Brunner were the owners of the world’s biggest
alkali works, at Winnington Hall in Cheshire. (Brunner-Mond was one of the
four firms that emergedin 1926 to found ICI, Britain’s answer tothe chemical
giants of Germany and the US. By then Mond’s son, Alfred, with thetitle
of Lord Melchett, was in charge.) It was at this stage in his career that
Mond bought his large house in St John’s Wood, at 20 Avenue Road, and turned
the stables into the private laboratory in which Langer made his discovery.
Together with his boss, Langer had been investigating the curious corrosion
that had been affecting nickel valves at Mond’s Cheshire works. The valves
were controlling the flow of carbon dioxide gas, and it turned out that
it was traces of carbon monoxide in the gas that had been attacking the
metal. Yet carbon monoxide was a major component of the town gas which was
piped to every street lamp and home in Victorian cities. Why should it attack
the nickel valves? As we now know, carbon monoxide will attach itself to
all kinds of metals, and the gas has since become one of the staple reagents
of inorganic chemists. Most metal carbonyls are of academic interest only.
Happily, Mond had lighted upon one of the few that has commercial potential,
and he exploited it.

Sadly, this kind of success story cannot be repeated in Britain today.
It is not so much that the economic climate has changed: the economic framework
of modern Britain is not unlike that in which Mond flourished. Rather, chemistry
has changed. It might still be possible to have a private laboratory in
a back garden in central London, but you would hardly be likely to get planning
permission once the local press got a whiff of carbon monoxide, let alone
of nickel carbonyl. This is so deadly that several men in the Swansea works
died when the process was introduced. But even if you could meet today’s
health and safety requirements, you would still come unstuck. Chemistry
is now much too expensive for anything less than a national approach.

The true cost of a degree course in chemistry is too high to be borne
privately; the vastness of the chemical literature too great for any university
or industrial library to have a complete record; the research and development
budget of an ICI or Glaxo needs each company to make more than a billion
pounds profit a year. Add all this together and you realise that only a
national policy for chemistry makes sense.

If there are any budding scientificgeniuses like Faraday or industrial
wizards like Mond in our schools today how do we tempt them to take the
chemical road? Certainly not by having the subject taught by teachers without
chemistry degrees, using dog-eared textbooks in run-down labs. A Michael
Faraday may be so in love with science as to surmount such obstacles; a
Ludwig Mond is likely to end up researching the more rewarding fields of
nickel futures and junk bonds.

Eddie Abel is Professor of Chemistry at the University of Exeter. John
Emsley is a reader in chemistry at King’s College, London.